Manage your subscription

Big break

A CHANCE sighting of a tear in the Earth’s magnetic shield has led to what
astronomers are claiming is the first empirical proof to end a 50-year-old
debate about how space weather causes polar auroras and disrupts satellite
communication systems.

In 1996, a NASA spacecraft named Polar appeared to travel directly through a
tear in the cocoon. One of Polar’s goals was to study how energy from charged
particles streaming out from the Sun—the solar wind—is transferred
into the Earth’s magnetosphere, the cocoon of charged particles travelling along
the Earth’s magnetic field …